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Tuesday, May 21, 2019

Offsite Post: ‘Despair and Hope in Belgium and the West’


A heartbreaking story about Belgium appeared recently.  The numbers of people seeking death by assisted suicide has grown disturbingly high:

Belgium has the most liberal euthanasia laws in the world. You can end your life here by simply telling a doctor that you have unbearable physical or mental suffering.

Terminally ill children of any age can receive a lethal injection if their parents agree with the child’s wishes.

 . . .

Belgian Euthanasia Commission Accused of Violating the Law

A member of Distelmans’ euthanasia commission resigned after the commission failed to act against a doctor who euthanized a dementia patient without consent. Dr. Ludo Van Opdenbosch wrote, “I do not want to be part of a committee that deliberately violates the law.”

Clarke says, “There are now more than 13,000 euthanasia cases that this commission has reviewed. And in those 13,000 I’m aware of now one which has been referred to the prosecutor.”

When Belgium passed its law legalizing euthanasia, critics warned that it was headed down an ethical slippery slope. Some wonder if the European nation may have hit bottom, as medical ethics are being replaced by a culture of death.

Euthanasia Now a “Medical Solution” in Belgium

Oncologist Benoit Beuselinck at University Hospitals-Leuven says, “We have begun to offer death as a medical solution, even for non-terminal cases. It’s a problem. I have heard about people who were offered euthanasia even though they were not even considering it.”

“The types of conditions, the things that would qualify someone for euthanasia, are being pushed further and further out, Clarke says, “There were euthanasias carried out on children as young as 17, 11 and nine.”

Professor of Health care Ethics, Dr. Theo Boer says, “The supply of euthanasia stirs the demand. What you see is that for an increasing number of people, euthanasia becomes the default way to die.”

 . . .


The embrace of death in Belgium is not isolated to that country; it is present in many other countries, as well.  The global suicide rate has risen 60% over the last 45 years (https://www.befrienders.org/suicide-statistics).  However, since this writer and the South in general spring from the same stream of Western European culture as Belgium, we will limit our analysis to that part of the world.

What is it that is causing the people of Belgium to embrace death to such a degree?  Her GDP is one of the highest in the world, 25th out of almost 200 countries (http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-gdp/), but her suicide rate is also one of the highest, 11th out of all countries (http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/suicide-rate-by-country/).  The same is true for other Western countries - high GDPs together with high suicide rates.  The trend has grown by alarming proportions here in the States, where the suicide rate has risen 33% from 1999 to 2016 (https://psmag.com/news/the-suicide-rate-is-at-its-highest-in-a-half-century), despite a GDP for the union that far outpaces others in the world.  If material things are the key to happiness (as the modern culture never tires of telling us), why are so many people rushing so quickly towards death, rather than savoring the good things of this life for as many years as possible?

The question answers itself:  ‘Man does not live by bread alone.’  The land of Belgium, and Western Europe as a whole, was once teeming with Orthodox churches and monasteries, with Christian bishops, hermits, martyrs, confessors, monks, nuns, priests, nobles, farmers, mothers, fathers, and such like.  The West was a spiritual garden abounding in saints and gifts of the Holy Ghost.  However, the West’s communion with the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, the Orthodox Church, was broken in 1054 by the actions of the Roman Pope, who drug the West into his newly created Roman Catholic ‘Church’.  The life-bestowing Grace of the Holy Ghost naturally fled from this imposter institution and from all who embraced it (this goes for the children of the Roman Catholic rebellion as well, the Protestant sects).  The post-Orthodox West, therefore, for all her external Christian garb, has little inner spiritual life to speak of.  She is like the white-washed tombs the Lord Jesus speaks of:  pretty on the outside but full of the stench of death on the inside.

Try as they might, the Western confessions will not be able to lift men above the horizon of this fallen world, for they are part of the very fabric of it.  No matter how many renovations, revivals, or reformations they go through, it will remain an impossibility.  Thus, we see them slip further and further into imbecility and the darkness of the passions; into clown masses and the silliness of megachurches:


Because the West has lost the Grace of the Holy Trinity, she is entering into a new age of despair, not unlike the one she knew before the dawning of the Light of the Incarnation of the God-man.  G. K. Chesterton describes that former time in memorable lines:

But in the case of many others I fancy there entered at this point a new negation.  Atheism became really possible in that abnormal time; for atheism is abnormality.  It is not merely the denial of a dogma.  It is the reversal of a subconscious assumption in the soul; the sense that there is a meaning and a direction in the world it sees.  Lucretius, the first evolutionist who endeavored to substitute Evolution for God, had already dangled before men’s eyes his dance of glittering atoms, by which he conceived cosmos as created by chaos.  But it was not his strong poetry or his sad philosophy, as I fancy, that made it possible for men to entertain such a vision.  It was something in the sense of impotence and despair with which men shook their fists vainly at the stars, as they saw all the best work of humanity sinking slowly and helplessly into a swamp.  They could easily believe that even creation itself was not a creation but a perpetual fall, when they saw that the weightiest and worthiest of all human creations was falling by its own weight.  They could fancy that all the stars were falling stars; and that the very pillars of their own solemn porticos were bowed under a sort of gradual Deluge.  To men in that mood there was a reason for atheism that is in some sense reasonable.  Mythology might fade and philosophy might stiffen; but if behind these things there was a reality, surely that reality might have sustained things as they sank.  There was no God; if there had been a God, surely this was the very moment when He would have moved and saved the world.

The life the great civilisation went on with dreary industry and even with dreary festivity.  It was the end of the world, and the worst of it was that it need never end.

--The Everlasting Man, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, Cal., 1993 [1925], pgs. 162-3.

It is just the same in our age:  Men have put aside God and have therefore grown weary of living; they long for death, but it won’t come quickly enough.  So they kill themselves instead.

Who can cure this disease of despair? 

The Saints of the Orthodox West. 

But what is a saint? 

A man or woman who has acquired the Holy Ghost, who has attained holiness. 

But because of Roman Catholic and Protestant ideas of legalistic, bank-ledger righteousness (the debt of sin, the infinite merits of Christ, etc.), the term ‘holiness’ and the concept of a saint have lost their former meanings.  St John Maximovitch (+1966), the Wonderworker of Shanghai and San Francisco, helps us to recover their original Orthodox meanings when he says in his homily,

Holiness is not simply righteousness, for which the righteous merit the enjoyment of blessedness in the Kingdom of God, but rather such a height of righteousness that men are filled with the Grace of God to such an extent, that it flows from them, upon those who associate with them. Great is their blessedness, which proceeds from personal experience of the Glory of God. Being filled also with love for men, which proceeds from love of God, they are responsive to men's needs and upon their supplication, they also appear as intercessors and defenders before God.


Archimandrite Vasileios expands on this wonderful mystery, writing of these healers of souls and bodies,

The Fathers of the Church are honoured and known as the great luminaries who reveal to us liturgically that “the Light of Christ shines upon all”.

When you approach them, you find a spontaneous offering of the truth which sets free.  You find life, honesty, confession, humility, the wealth of the spirit, the ascension of the flesh, the transfiguration of the world, the illumination of the opaque, the meaning of the insignificant, the grace of eternity spread over the everyday and ordinary, man given his true value, the cooling-fiery furnace of the Divine Liturgy in which all things have been filled with a light which transfigures them:  it makes them all fire.  It makes them all cooling dew.  The Fathers, full of grace as they are, move about freely.  They speak personally.  They scatter blessing.  They tolerate everyone (in their strictness).  They know everyone through their love.  They love everyone with the love of the one God in Trinity, who is love.  They love everyone, because they themselves are love.  Through them you know that the Orthodox Church lives the truth as a communion of love.  It honours communion as a manifestation of the trinitarian deity.  It respects man as a person in communion.

And God the Word goes outside Himself and comes to dwell in all through His intense longing, that all may become partakers of His grace and His divinity.  . . .  He becomes man and takes on everything that is ours, apart from sin, so as to give us everything that is His, apart from identity of essence.  So that all may become sons of God and gods by grace.

This self-emptying, as a work of unfathomable love, is a theophany – a revelation of the truth of God as a communion of persons who love each other.

This is the gospel of the new creation, the message of life which the Fathers proclaim by their existence.  They show the way of existence.  And they teach you how to live, to write, to organise…

They allow everything to move freely.  They wait for the other person to find his own rhythm, to find his path.  They sacrifice their lives, in the likeness of the God-man, for the life of the other.  They pour out grace.  They hide their virtue out of modesty.  They know that everything true is given from above.  They have given to God what little they had.  And they have received everything.  They receive it constantly, they accept it without ceasing.  And they cannot bear the abundance of life.  They want to withdraw to the sidelines, to be quiet, to vanish, to calm down, not to be commented on.  All they want is for others to live.

This reality of the dawning of grace as a divine gift is something greater than all the glories and honours of the world.

 . . . Their being shone out of them.  They did not learn things divine, they experienced them; they underwent them.  These things changed them, deified them.  They have become a revelation of God – in other words, a true revelation of man.  They show what man is and what he is able to become. 

 . . .


--

Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!

Anathema to the Union!

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